Un ruban autour d'une bombe: How Frida Kahlo Spurned André Breton and the Surrealists

Frida Kahlo y André Breton 

(Mexico,1938) 

 

They are so damn intellectual and rotten that I can't stand them ... 

I'd rather sit on the floor in the market of Toluca and sell tortillas, 

than have anything to do with those Surrealist sons of bitches ...[1] 

 

 

I. 

 

The more I read about Frida Kahlo - and I've been doing nothing else but read about this Ballardian Angel for the past week - the more my affection for her increases ... 

 

She loved animals, collecting dolls, drinking tequila, and wearing traditional Mexican dresses - all things which immediately put a person in my good books. 

 

She also spurned the High Priest of Surrealism, André Breton, when he attempted to draw her into his artistic fold - and this significantly boosts my admiration for her.

 

So, as much as I'd love to chat about her pet spider monkeys, her drinking habits, or her fashion sense, it's Frida's relationship with Breton and her contempt for the Surrealists that I've chosen to focus on here ... 

 

 

II.

 

There are several reasons why I don't like André Breton; why I instinctively side, for example, with Bataille and his base materialism over the former's idealism. 

 

For one thing, while Breton was not mistaken to call Bataille an excremental philosopher, Bataille was spot on to characterise Breton as a false revolutionary with a Christ complex.   

 

Anyhoo, whatever the reason, the point is I don't like him. And so I'm glad Kahlo had the good sense to reject his (slightly creepy) overtures to her, when he visited Mexico in 1938. 

 

 

III.

 

Apparently, upon seeing her work Breton was immediately captivated. He declared Frida to be a natural born surrealist, describing her art as like a ribbon around a bomb (i.e., superficially pretty, but with a violent emotional reality at its heart). 

 

Eager to co-opt her unique vision, Breton offered to promote her work in Europe and organise a major exhibition of Mexican art in Paris that would include some of her paintings. And, to be fair, he did do this [2].

 

But while Kahlo gratefully accepted his help, she fiercely resisted Breton's attempts to claim her as one of his own, making it clear that she had no intention of becoming merely an exotic muse who fulfilled male aesthetic fantasies. 

 

She famously stated: "They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality." 

 

 

IV. 

 

For Kahlo, her art was a deeply personal and material reflection of her lived experience. She found the European Surrealists' preoccupation with symbolism and accessing the subconscious mind at odds with her goal of processing physical pain and trauma.

 

Furthermore, her trip to Paris in 1939 for the Mexique exhibition [1], completely soured her view of Breton and his circle. In letters to her lover, the photographer Nickolas Muray, she scathingly dismissed Breton and the French Surrealists as pretentious, disorganised good-for-nothings who sat in cafés all day [3]. 

 

In fact, she went as far as to call Breton a cucaracha - which is not a nice thing to be called in any language.   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm slightly paraphrasing from a letter written by Frida Kahlo to Nickolas Muray on 16 February 1939. As one commentator notes: 

      "Her letters to him are the sharpest, funniest and most brutally honest accounts we have of her time in France. She wrote to Muray not just to update him, but to release steam - to unload her frustrations about the Surrealists, the filth of the city, her failing health, and her utter disappointment in Breton's empty promises." 

      See the post titled 'Frida Kahlo in Paris', on (the excellent blog by Wally and Duke) The Not So Innocents Abroad (21 April 2025). See also the post by Verity Babs on Artnet titled 'Art Bites: Why Frida Kahlo Hated the French Surrealists' (14 May 2024) for a further info and analysis. 

      Finally, note that Kahlo's handwritten letter to Muray - in English and containing a lipstick kiss - is preserved in the Archives of American Art, at the Smithsonian Institution.    

 

[2] The Mexique exhibition took place in Paris from March 10 to March 25, 1939, at the Galerie Renou et Colle (aka the Pierre Colle Gallery) and was organised by Breton and Marcel Duchamp. 

      Intended to provide a window on to Mexican culture in general, it nevertheless featured eighteen paintings by Frida Kahlo and marked her European debut. Her self-portrait, The Frame (1938), was acquired by the French state, making her the first 20th-century Mexican artist to have a work included in their collection. 

 

[3] It should be noted that there were exceptions to this: Kahlo did have time for Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, whom she praised for keeping his feet on the ground. But the rest were, in her eyes, pompous windbags and lunatics.   

 

 

Frida Kahlo and D. H. Lawrence: Mexican Monobrow vs English Red Beard

Frida y Lorenzo (SA/2026) [1]

 

 

I. 

 

The Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and English writer D. H. Lawrence never met. 

 

For while he spent a significant amount of time in Mexico between 1923 and 1925, Frida was just a teenager then, even if already moving in the political and artistic circles of Mexico City [2].

 

But they could have met. And one suspects that if Lawrence had died in 1940 rather than 1930, they may very well have crossed paths at some point.

 

It's doubtful, however, that they would have got along ...

 

 

II. 

 

For while they moved in overlapping bohemian circles and shared close mutual friends, they were very different characters belonging to different generations, classes, and cultures, who held very different views on politics, religion, and sex: she was a Marxist atheist who liked to screw around; he wasn't and didn't. 

 

Oh, and Lawrence had been rude about her husband, Diego Rivera, judging his artwork as a failure that stripped the indigenous peoples of Mexico of their complex history and humanity by viewing them through an ideal political lens and turning them into little more than avatars of socialism [3]. 

 

Somehow, I can't imagine that would have endeared him to her ... 

 

 

III. 

It's ironic, therefore, that when Vogue published a review of Kahlo's solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery (NYC, 1938), the reviewer gleefully reported that people were discussing her paintings as "looking like D. H. Lawrence on canvas, all fertility and gore" [4]. 

 

This widely circulated quote permanently linked their names in art history, leading many to assume a personal connection between Kahlo and Lawrence which - as we have indicated - didn't actually exist. 

 

And so we are left to fantasise a meeting between them and overlook the likelihood that they would have detested each other. Indeed, it's easier to imagine her smashing a bottle of tequila over his head (or vice versa) than the two of them playing nice together or making whoopee. 

 

Having said that, I think it's highly likely that Frida Kahlo and Frieda Lawrence would - despite a 27-year age gap - have hit it off had they had the opportunity to meet ...

 

 

IV. 

 

Why do I say that? 

 

Well, for one thing, not only did they share the same name [5], but Kahlo was, in fact, half-German. And so, while Spanish may have been her primary language, Frida konnte Deutsch sprechen und schreiben [6] and would have been able to chat with the German-born Frieda Lawrence in her native tongue.

 

More than this, there were striking similarities in their temperaments and each fully embraced an unconventional lifestyle: Frieda Lawrence was defined by her fierce commitment to emotional honesty, sexual liberation, and the rejection of bourgeois conventions [7]. 

 

She would have admired Kahlo's unapologetic approach to both her art and her love life and found Kahlo's fierce intelligence, sharp wit, and dramatic flair captivating. 

And Kahlo, for her part, would surely have found Mrs Lawrence a kindred spirit - one who valued living with vital intensity and knew how to guard her own identity and freedom whilst married to an internationally famous artist. 

 

The fact that Frieda also spent many years living in Taos, New Mexico and was deeply immersed in the landscape and the culture of the American Southwest, would probably have intrigued Kahlo also.  

 

It's a shame that their mutual friend, Georgia O'Keeffe, never thought to arrange a meeting ... 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The image is based on a passport picture of Lawrence taken in 1921 and Nickolas Muray's iconic photo of Frida Kahlo wearing a traditional Mexican shawl (known as a rebozo in Spanish) taken in New York, in 1938, prior to her solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery. Visit  artsy.net to view the original colour portrait. 

 

[2] Kahlo was born in July 1907 - so was almost 22 years younger than Lawrence, who was born in September 1885. When she had her fateful accident on 17 September 1925 in Mexico City, aged eighteen, Lawrence had just turned forty and was on board a steamship bound for England. 

      Coincidentally, however, he had almost died in Mexico City himself earlier that year having contracted typhoid, malaria, and a severe bout of flu. He fell so ill that he entered the American Military Hospital and it was there that doctors officially diagnosed his advanced tuberculosis, bluntly informing his wife, Frieda, that he had less than two years to live. 

 

[3] Lawrence didn't produce a dedicated essay on Rivera; instead, his commentary is scattered across fictional works, travel essays, and private letters from his time in Mexico and New Mexico in the 1920s.

      His most sustained (if veiled) critique of Rivera is found in chapter III of The Plumed Serpent (1926): the protagonist Kate Leslie visits the University in Mexico City to look at some newly painted murals (a direct reference to the real-life murals Rivera and his contemporaries were painting on the walls of public institutions at the time). Channelling his own disdain through Kate, Lawrence describes the works as full of caricatures of wicked capitalists and saintly proletarians and notes that the Indians painted on the walls look like flat wooden symbols rather than living human beings. For Lawrence, Rivera was ultimately just another bourgeois bohemian engaged in lazy political posturing. 

      Finally, it is worth noting also that Frida Kahlo's extensive personal library is still preserved at her home turned museum - La Casa Azul - in Coyoacán, and while she owned a vast collection of international literature, Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent is not noted by historians or curators as a prized volume in her collection. 

      In fact, her friend, the American photographer Edward Weston - who also knew and photographed Lawrence during the latter's visit to Mexico City in 1924 - noted in his diary that the intellectual elite in Mexico at the time largely rejected Lawrence's novel as an inaccurate and exoticised view of their nation. 

 

[4] See Bertram D. Wolfe, 'Rise of Another Rivera', Vogue (1 November, 1938).

      Wolfe was an interesting figure: highly active as a communist, art critic and biographer, he later rejected Stalinism and became a fierce anti-communist intellectual. While living in Mexico in the 1920s, he befriended Rivera and wrote extensively on the Mexican mural movement. He also recorded conversations with Rivera's wife, Frida Kahlo, which remain vital primary sources for researchers into her life and work. 

 

[5] Frida's father, born Carl Wilhelm Kahlo in the golden city of Pforzheim, moved to Mexico in 1891 (aged 19) and changed his name to Guillermo Kahlo. She permanently dropped the 'e' in her name in 1935 as a political gesture (naturally enough, she wasn't keen to be seen as half-German following the rise to power of the Nazis in 1933), although she also wanted, as an artist, to align herself closely with the people and culture of Mexico. 

 

[6] The multilingual Miss Kahlo also spoke French and English fluently and had familiarity with the indigenous Mexican language Nahuatl. Spanish was the main language used at home when she was growing up with her three sisters primarily because her mother, Matilde Calderón, was of Oaxacan and Spanish descent and did not speak German. 

 

[7] Frieda famously abandoned her children and her status as a professor's wife in England to run away with a penniless and relatively unknown young writer (Lawrence), in 1912.  

 

 

Thanks to Maria Thanassa for suggesting this post. 

 

 

Fridamania: Notes on an Accident and Becoming a Ballardian Angel

Salma Hayek as Frida Kahlo in the bus crash scene [1]  

in Frida (dir. Julie Taymor, 2002)

 

I. 

 

Like most people, I knew that the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo had been seriously injured in a collision involving a wooden bus and an electric streetcar (that may or may not have been named Deseo). But until a few days ago, I didn't know details of the accident or the nature and extent of her injuries. 

 

Now that I do, however, I can see why this event has taken on such metaphorical (and near mythical) status. It wasn't fatal, but it was certainly fateful and reveals not only the brutal reality of what happens when vulnerable bodies are smashed by merciless mechanical forces, but how moments of grotesque horror and suffering can have terrible beauty and be transformative.   

 

Kahlo would say afterwards that she lost her virginity on the day of the accident: the broken iron handrail that pierced her lower body entered via her pelvic region and exited through her vagina (puncturing her uterus as it did so) [2]. But she was not only born a woman on 17 September 1925, but born an artist and what might be called a Ballardian angel ...

   

 

II. 

  

For some reason, the sight of Jesus on his Cross has never really resonated with me. 

 

I know crucifixion was designed to maximise suffering over a prolonged period of time - we have the modern word excruciating to remind us of this - and it can't be much fun to have large nails driven through one's hands and feet; as the artist Sebastian Horsley courageously confirmed in 2000 when he re-enacted the Passion of the Christ [3].  

 

But, my compassion for Jesus is limited by the fact that he predicted (some might say provoked) his own gruesome fate whilst doing nothing to prevent such, believing as he did that it was a central and pre-ordained part of God's redemptive plan. In other words, he connived in his own crucifixion and in doing so nailed us all to the Cross.   

 

Further, we are also led to believe that this act of self-sacrifice was something of a sham. For just three days later he was up and about and back from the dead having learned nothing. His resurrection renders his death meaningless - just as his supernatural ascension makes mortal life seem of no real significance. 

 

Frida Kahlo's impaling on a metal pole on the other hand - her rebirth and transformation - seems much more real, much more beautiful, much more moving, much more inspiring to me. I don't adore Kahlo or see her as some kind feminist deity or queer icon - I don't even particularly like her work [4] - but I'd rather sip tequila with her than munch dry bread with Jesus. 

 

 

III.  

   

Unfortunately for Kahlo, all the tequila in the world wasn't enough to numb completely the severe lifelong physical pain she experienced due to the accident, multiple surgeries, several miscarriages, and the emotional distress caused by her rollercoaster marriage to fellow artist Diego Rivera (twenty years her senior).    

 

She once amusingly wrote: Bebía porque quería ahogar mis penas, pero las malvadas aprendieron a nadar ... [5]. However, we're not here to discuss her drinking habits, her unhappiness, or her art. 

 

We're here, rather, to focus on the crash which has acquired a permanent place in the popular imagination because of the highly surreal details surrounding it - most of which were actually true, including the fact that a fellow passenger was carrying a packet of gold paint powder that burst open on impact and covered Kahlo's bleeding, semi-naked body, creating a horrific yet visually striking and magical image [6]. 

 

And then there's the handrail, which we have already mentioned ... 

 

 

IV.

 

Certain people - including medieval Christians and Nazi occultists - get terribly excited over what is sometimes referred to as the Spear of Destiny (i.e., the lance with which one of the Roman soldiers is said to have pierced the side of Christ on the Cross to ensure that he was dead before being taken down). 

 

Indeed, just like Kirk Brandon, I was a little obsessed with Trevor Ravenscroft's bizarre but influential bestselling book of that title in the early-mid '80s [7].  

 

Happily, such holy relics now mean nothing to me and I find the thought of Frida Kahlo's little body being impaled with a snapped iron handrail is more fascinating to me than the thought of Jesus being pricked like a sausage by some superstitious Roman centurion. 

 

And, to tell the truth, I'm a little surprised and disappointed that J. G. Ballard didn't mention Kahlo and her accident in his astonishing novel Crash (1973) [8]. The nature and severity of her injuries and the fact she then had to rely on surgical corsets, back braces, and metal prosthetics, perfectly anticipate his work: was he never tempted to call Gabrielle Frida and give her a monobrow?  

 

V. 

 

In sum: Ballard missed a trick! 

 

Connecting Kahlo's real-life accident to his dystopian fiction would have added a brilliant layer to his study of how human trauma, technology, art, sex, and death are entwined. Like the characters in Crash who obsessively photograph and document collisions, Kahlo spent the rest of her life reimagining and mythologising the exact moment her body was fucked by public transport.  

 

Whether the nightmarish events endured by Kahlo and Ballard's crash-loving protagonists provide a liberating line of flight for everyone is, of course, debatable. Not all of us subscribe to a kinky cyborg aesthetic in which human flesh perversely fuses with metal, and wounds become the site of a new sexuality. 

 

(There are still Christians, for example, who prefer to fantasise about a spiritual union with Christ.)  

 

Ultimately, both Kahlo and Ballard suggest that when the human body is shattered by motor vehicles the victim does not simply heal; they are forced to reinvent what it means to be human within a technological world. 

 

Not that the current exhibition at the Tate - Frida: The Making of an Icon - hints at anything like this: it prefers to celebrate the clichéd and kitschy commodification of Kahlo rather than recognise her as the ultimate nightmare angel born of unimaginable violence, physical suffering, social non-conformity and revolutionary politics.

 

 

 

El accidente (17 September 1926), graphite on paper 

(Colección Juan Rafael Coronel Rivera) [9]

 

Notes

 

[1] This scene - and the surreal operating room sequence that follows in which director Julie Taymor cleverly incorporated stop-motion animation and traditional Mexican Día de los Muertos imagery - can be viewed on YouTube: click here.  

 

[2] Kahlo was a promiscuous bisexual who had affairs with figures ranging from Leon Trotsky to Josephine Baker. Nevertheless, her sexuality - like her art - was to a large extent shaped by her accident and she fucked as an act of defiance and a means of reclaiming power over (and pleasure from) a broken body. 

 

[3] See the post: 'On the Crucifixion of Sebastian Horsley' (4 April 2015). 

 

[4] The modern cultural industry has turned Kahlo into a heavily commercialised simulation and pop icon; see the sister post to this one - 'Fridamania: Notes on a Frida Kahlo Exhibition as a Perfect Crime Scene' (22 October 2026). 

 

[5] This is commonly translated into English as: 'I drank so as to drown my sorrows, but the damned things learned how to swim.' It's an internet variation of a line originally written by Kahlo in a letter to Ella Wolfe (19 October 1938); see The Letters of Frida Kahlo: Cartas Apasionadas, compiled by Martha Zamora (Chronicle Books, 1995).

 

[6] This scene was powerfully recreated in Julie Taymore's 2002 film, Frida, starring Salma Hayek - see the screenshot above which I chose to illustrate this post.

 

[7] Trevor Ravenscroft, The Spear of Destiny (Neville Spearman Publishers, 1972). 

 

[8] As far as I remember, Ballard makes no mention of Kahlo in Crash, although he does invoke her name in a much later novel Millennium People (2003), in which the character Sally Markham is obsessed by Kahlo's life and work following a serious accident in Lisbon involving a tram. Ballard shows how modern individuals often base their identities on the lives of famous people in order to add a little glamour to their own boring lives and find some sense of meaning.      

      Kahlo's absence from Crash has been a point of discussion among critics and fans of the book. See, for example, Steve Finbow's excellent essay, 'The Absent Muse: the Terminal Prosthesis of Frida Kahlo and J. G. Ballard', on creatrixmag.com (5 July 2026).  

 

[9] A year after the accident that enabled her to become the woman she was, Kahlo recalled the event in this rather charming pencil sketch. 

 

 

Fridamania: Notes on a Frida Kahlo Exhibition as a Perfect Crime Scene

Frida Kahlo: Representation of the Accident (undated) 

 tate.org.uk [1]

 

I. 

 

To be honest, I'm not a huge fan of Frida Kahlo and wouldn't have gone to Tate Modern's current exhibition Frida: The Making of an Icon (25 June 2026 - 3 Jan 2027) if it wasn't top of the Little Greek's list of things she wanted to do on her birthday ... 

 

And so, despite certain reservations - not so much about the artist and her work, but the highly commercial, punter-pleasing nature of the exhibition itself - off we set on a grey and drizzly Tuesday morning to Bankside, only stopping first for coffee and croissants at the Royal Exchange (as you do) ... 

 

 

II.

 

There's a combination of reasons why I have never been entirely taken with Frida Kahlo and her work. 

 

Firstly, there are those elements of dreamy surrealism and folksy magical realism that seduced André Breton, but which I find irritating after a while; too many symbols, Mozart. 

 

Secondly, her concerns to do with gender, postcolonial identity, the female body and its experience of pain, revolutionary Mexican politics, etc., are ultimately not mine and whilst I'm vaguely interested in what she has to say about these things, I don't want them forced upon me in painting after painting. 

 

Also, how many self-portraits by the same artist can one reasonably be expected to find interesting: at what point does it all become a wee bit repetitive and reveal both technical limitation and narrow thematic focus [2] when an artist simply paints her own boat? 

 

Kahlo only produced around 150 works and of these over a third feature her own monobrowed likeness and whilst she certainly had a distinctive (and not unattractive) look, it's not one I find as endlessly fascinating as many people today clearly do [3].    

 

 

III. 

 

The exhibition was spread over ten rooms, each with a different title and theme. A standard adult ticket was priced at £25—or £64 if you wanted a two-course lunch in the Level 6 restaurant (where I highly recommend the grilled octopus, even if the onglet steak left me underwhelmed).

 

Writing in The Guardian, art critic Jonathan Jones is quick to point out that the exhibition only features thirty-six works by Kahlo herself and that it is supplemented not only with photographs and archival materials (including several Tehuana dresses), but by a wide range of works produced by contemporaries and those who have since been influenced by her art, image, and legend, helping to manufacture the Frida Kahlo myth-cum-global-commercial-brand.        

 

Actually, Jones says the show is "padded out with responses by lesser artists" [4], but that's a bit unfair in its sweeping dismissiveness of artists that include monumental figures like Diego Rivera and influential contemporaries like Judy Chicago. To be honest, I enjoyed seeing some of their works more than I did looking at Kahlo's own. 

 

In fact, unlike Jones - and unlike The Observer's art critic Laura Cumming, who also argues that the Tate exhibition woefully sells Kahlo short [5] - I was pleased to discover that this was not merely an exhibition by Kahlo, but an exhibition about her and, in particular, about how the world succumbed to Fridamania.    

 

Ms Cumming complains that the artist's own work is singularly missing from the show, but I think she's missing the point. 

 

The clue to the exhibition is right there in the title: The Making of an Icon. The curators [6] aren't trying to give us a pure and predictable retrospective; they are documenting the exact process by which Kahlo has disappeared beneath multiple interpretations and mass-produced merchandise - it's le crime parfait, as Baudrillard would say [7]. 

 

Since Kahlo is now present everywhere, her ringing absence in the galleries is no longer an issue. 

  

 

 

  

Notes

 

[1] As is well-known, Kahlo was severely injured in a bus crash when she was eighteen (1925). And perhaps my favourite image in the Tate exhibition discussed here is this one in which she restages the accident with a rag doll and toy horse-and-cart. As Jonathan Jones says, there's a primal quality to Kahlo's memories of this devastating event and this picture suggests it marked the end of childhood innocence and pain-free joy. Photo by Stephen Alexander (20 Oct 2026). 

 

[2] To be honest, I'm not overly concerned by these things. That is to say, I don't much care about so-called technical deficiencies in her work or even if her range of external reference was narrow and this led to repetition and self-obsessiveness. 

      But ultimately, unlike Madonna, I just wouldn't want one of her works hanging on my wall - they simply don't hold my interest for very long, with one or two exceptions, such as the miniature oil on tin plate painting titled in English 'Girl with a Death Mask' (1938), that really charmed me at the exhibition (a print is available in the Tate shop). 

 

[3] It is worth recalling that Kahlo remained a relatively unknown figure until the late 1970s, when her work was rediscovered by art historians and an assortment of feminists, queers, political activists, etc., all began to see themselves reflected in her life and work. 

 

[4] Jonathan Jones, 'Frida: The Making of an Icon review', The Guardian (22 June, 2026). 

 

[5] Laura Cumming, 'Frida: The Making of an Icon sells a great artist short', The Observer (25 June 2026).

      Among several criticisms - mostly aimed at the cack-handed portraits by other artists on display and members of the viewing public who dared hold up smartphones in order to record their own Instagram homages - Ms Cumming complains that "what is singularly missing from this show, first to last, is the artist's own work". I will address this point in the main text. 

 

[6] The exhibition was curated by Tobias Ostrander and Beatriz García-Velasco. The show was organized in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

 

[7] I'm thinking here of Jean Baudrillard's argument in The Perfect Crime (Verso, 1996), where he refers to the extermination and vanishing of reality. 

      Interestingly, Jonathan Jones notices how, in the Tate show, Kahlo as "a real person who made intensely autobiographical work" suddenly disappears only to be replaced by "homages, restagings, deconstructions and, finally, merchandise", but he fails to understand why this is symptomatic of the times in which we live and ends his review by simply defending her true greatness. 

 

 

For a sister post to this one on accidentally becoming a Ballardian angel, click here.

      

 

Reflections on a Fat Sand Rat

Top: photo of a fat sand rat by fmeijerdd (2023) 

on deviantart.com 

Bottom: Joan Miró: Le Rat des Sables (1975) 

Aquatint in colours on Arches paper (96 x 138.8 cm) 

shaperomodern.com

 

 

I. 

 

Once, at a graduate seminar titled 'Non-Oedipal Models of Psychology', Maggie Nelson was asked to participate in a "quick get-to-know-you game involving totem animals" [1]; an exercise that triggered her identity phobia. 

Not quite knowing what to say as she didn't possess any such animal, Nelson nervously awaited her turn as they went around the room, and then just blurted out otter, for no real reason other than the fact that it was important at the time for her to feel "small, slick, quick, amphibious, dexterous, capable" [2]. 

 

Like Nelson, not identifying with any tribe, clan, or close-knit community, I don't have a totem animal either; nor even do I have a spirit animal looking over me as an individual [3]. However, if I were put on the spot and obliged, like Nelson, to suddenly come up with such, I think at this point in time (when I'm feeling a little overweight) I'd probably say the fat sand rat ...

 

 

II. 

 

The fat sand rat (Psammomys obesus) is a terrestrial mammal belonging to the gerbil subfamily that is mostly found in the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East. Despite their (rather unflattering) name, they are actually very fussy eaters in the wild, only consuming stems and leaves from plants that belong to the genus Amaranthus. It's when they are kept in captivity and fed the wrong diet that they become obese and rapidly develop diabetes-like symptoms [4].  

 

As well as foraging for food, sand rats like to explore, to sunbathe, and to sleep; so quite a pleasant life, although they are not the most social of animals, preferring to live alone in their burrows and only interacting with members of the opposite sex for breeding purposes in the autumn to early spring period (perhaps followed by a bit of grooming). As a rule, it's the females who initiate such activity, although once fucked they will quickly turn aggressive and see off their mates.  

 

Obviously, fat sand rats can't afford to be too relaxed; for they are preyed upon by birds, snakes, desert cats and weasals, so have to be vigilant at all times. When frightened, they squeak, stamp their feet and then scarper below ground.    

 

 

III.

 

Of course, my reason for chooing the fat sand rat as my totem animal doesn't only relate to the fact that - due to the Little Greek's endless baking and years of inactivity due to my Essex exile - I have piled on the pounds. I was also influenced by my new admiration for one of Miró's monumental prints currently on display (and sale) at one of my favourite galleries here in London (Shapero Modern) ... [5]

 

Entitled Le Rat des Sables and printed in 1975 (as a signed series of 50), this work doesn't actually depict a fantastical creature as we are informed in the catalogue. For the sand rat is not a mythical or fictional being that exists only in legends or folk tales. Rather, as indicated above, sand rats - whatever their somatotype - are very much living organisms or biological entities; the result of evolution rather than the human imaginary.

 

Having said that, perhaps having been transformed by Miró into a work of modern art, this particular sand rat with its bold fluid lines and bright red eye, might (at a stretch) be thought of as a type of alibrije; a term coined by Mexican artist Pedro Linares to refer to his brightly coloured zoomorphic sculptures made from papier-mâché [6].    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (Melville House UK, 2016), p. 139. 

[2] Ibid.

 

[3] Whilst most people today - if they use these terms at all - use them interchangeably, they do, technically, have distinct meanings; a totem animal belongs to a group of people and represents their shared identity or collective spirit; a spirit animal, on the other hand - sometimes called a power animal - is chosen by and called upon by an individual as a guide, or protector, or source of inspiration on their unique life journey.   

[4] Unfortunately for the sand rats, this has led to their use in research into obesity and diabetes. They are also used in tests related to sleep patterns and seasonal affective disorder due to the fact that, like humans, they are diurnal. And, because of their remarkably efficient kidneys - crucial for life in very hot and very dry environments - they are further studied by scientists who think any amount of cruelty to animals can be justified so long as their is some human benefit (be it medical or commercal in nature).   

[5] For a recent post on this exhibition - Joan Miró: Monumental Printmaking (6 Mar - 4 May 2025) - click here. Or to visit the Shapero gallery website directly, please click here.  

[6] This art form originated in Mexico City in the 1930s, when Pedro Linares began creating his surreal creatures after experiencing vivid hallucinations during an illness. His designs, which combined elements of various real animals, became widely known as alebrijes and inspired many other artists and artisans, quickly becoming a significant aspect of Mexican folk art that combined indigenous traditions with modern artistic ideas. 

      Whether Joan Miró was thinking of them when he created his sand rat is not something I am able to say for sure, but it's certainly possible; Frida Kahlo was a fan of Linares and his figures and Miró admired the latter, whom he met during an exhibition in Paris, in 1939.